


these late eclipses

by Casylum



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-03
Updated: 2017-06-03
Packaged: 2018-11-08 08:52:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11078205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Casylum/pseuds/Casylum
Summary: He can't remember what she looks like.





	these late eclipses

**Author's Note:**

> GLOUCESTER: These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend/no good to us: though the wisdom of nature can/reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself/scourged by the sequent effects: love cools,/friendship falls off, brothers divide: in/cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in/palaces, treason; and the bond cracked 'twixt son/and father. This villain of mine comes under the/prediction; there's son against father: the king/falls from bias of nature; there's father against/child. We have seen the best of our time:/machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all/ruinous disorders, follow us disquietly to our/graves.
> 
> — KING LEAR, Act I, Scene ii

He can’t remember what she looks like.

There aren’t any portraits at Winterfell, only the statues in the catacombs, carved by men with only the vaguest idea of who they were portraying, and with no eye towards beauty. Nothing pretty comes from death, not even the memories of those who’ve embraced it. He’s there now, his niche in the long stretch of stone empty of his likeness, but full of what he was.

“ _They say he cannot die_ ”, they’d whispered around the campfires in the Neck, eyes wide and slightly awed by the Young Wolf who walked among them. He’d laughed, and drank their ale, and told them that he bled as easy as the rest of them (if not as easily as Tywin Lannister would have liked). They’d nodded, but he could see that it was the Wolf that rose in their minds, not the youth who was barely holding on.

But dead he was, flesh rotted in the ground near Harrenhal as his body was dragged back to King’s Landing, his bones tossed in a jumble in the Sept of Baelor, given a spot of infamy next to the dead Targaryen kings. Grey Wind’s head is there as well, perched on his ribcage as his own skull rattles somewhere in Joffrey’s old rooms, closed up following his untimely death. For some reason, however, the Old Gods won’t let him go, tethering his soul to this life even though he should have left long ago, following the bright trails of his mother and father into the endless black.

All of this he knows, all of this he remembers, even though he was dead when it happened. Life escapes him though, flows away on the brisk Northern wind and taunts him with all that was and will never be again. Mother and Father laughing in the Great Hall, heads together and shoulders shaking the falls of chestnut and auburn together. Bran up on the walls, legs strong instead of hanging limp, the ravens screeching around him. Jon serious in the practice yard with a wooden sword, Arya in front of him like a dancer, the rhythmic clack of wood echoing from the stone.

But she’s missing, with nothing but blanks and screams where she should be, her face just wisps of a memory that warms him in the cold, stark night.

He doesn’t even remember her name.

~~~

Winterfell is a ruin.

The stones are burnt black where they aren’t torn down, and there’s a lingering scent of rotting meat that won’t leave, no matter how hard the servants scrub. It’s not the home she left, not even really a home any longer, just a jumble of rocks that echo with screams. But she’s here, and she can’t let it go.

“There must always be a Stark in Winterfell,” she whispers to herself, and for the first time in a long time that name rings true.

The Iron Throne is gone, melted down for slag and cannonballs in the last days of the Final Siege, the position of King of the Seven Kingdoms dissolved soon after. Winter had come with a bloody vengeance, sweeping down the south and causing snow to be sighted in Dorne for the first time in a thousand years.

In the end, it was their doom that had saved them, Daenerys Targaryen’s armies landing just as the Others had broken through the ragged line of Night’s Watchmen and Northmen standing to intercept the flood of ice and death at Godseye. Jon had been in that battle, him and Bran riding the minds of wolves as the snow melted from the heat of men dying only to rise and rise and rise again.

The Dothraki and the seemingly endless Unsullied had had weapons forged from dragonglass, still a rare commodity in the Seven Kingdoms, and they cut through the horde of Others on their pale not-horses, downed them and shattered them back into the ice they were born from. Fire cannot kill a dragon, she’s heard it said, but it did pretty damn well on the creatures of winter.

Arya had come with the Dragon Queen, stoic and dark by her side, smiling only when the Royal party came to the Bloody Gate, and her sister saw her standing on the wall. She’s here now, wandering quietly through the snow and ruin, her eyes assessing and calculating the damage left by the Ironborn, and the Boltons and desperation.

Queen in the North has such an odd ring to it, but after Asha Greyjoy had taken over the Iron Islands, and Daenerys the cracked and scarred ground that now made up the Targaryen holdings, it’s not as strange as all that. More houses than one have had to deal with a severe shift towards feminine leadership, as most all of the able-bodied noblemen had died at least once in the Long Winter.

She couldn’t help but think, though, in the quiet between the howl of air through jagged rock, that it should have been Robb’s title, Robb’s homecoming, not hers. She’s not even sure where he’s buried, except to say that it isn’t here. Besides, it’s been so long that she doesn’t really remember what he looked like, there at the end, her memory crowded with a gangly boy with too somber eyes and a wide smile and hair that matched her own.

She’s got a sword for him, cold iron sheathed in dragonglass, made special by the tall man who’d come to stand by Arya’s side after the war had settled, but she doesn’t know where to put it. Normally it would cross his bones, hold him to himself and the afterlife, but she doesn’t have them.

All she’s got is the wisps of a memory, one that fades more and more every day.

**Author's Note:**

> Written in the Summer of 2013


End file.
